Kratom is legal to possess in the United Kingdom. It is also an offence to produce it, to supply it, to offer to supply it, or to import it. Both statements are true, and the gap between them is the whole of the UK position: you break no law by holding kratom, and there is no lawful way to obtain it.
That sounds like a contradiction. It is not. The United Kingdom chose to control kratom through a law that never mentions it, and that law bans the trade without criminalising the user.
The instrument
The controlling law is the Psychoactive Substances Act 2016, which came into force on 26 May 2016. It does not name kratom. It does not list any substance at all. Instead it defines its target by effect:
A substance produces a psychoactive effect if it affects a person’s mental functioning or emotional state by stimulating or depressing their central nervous system.
Anything that does that, and is not specifically exempted, is a “psychoactive substance” for the purposes of the Act. This blanket approach was the point. It was written to catch new compounds faster than they could be named one by one.
Why kratom is caught, even though it is not named
The Act exempts a short list of things in Schedule 1: controlled drugs already covered by the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971, medicinal products, alcohol, nicotine and tobacco, caffeine, and food. Kratom is none of them.
It is not a controlled drug: kratom has never been scheduled under the Misuse of Drugs Act. We check that rather than assume it. Schedule 2 to the 1971 Act, in the version currently in force, contains no entry for kratom, Mitragyna speciosa or mitragynine under any spelling.
Two things make that absence worth something. The schedule did render when we read it, because cocaine, cannabis and lysergide are in the text we searched. And the text is the current one rather than an old copy, because isotonitazene, metonitazene and bromazolam are in it too, and all three were added long after 2015.
Kratom is not a licensed medicinal product either. The food exemption is narrower than it looks. It covers a substance that “is ordinarily consumed as food” and “does not contain a prohibited ingredient.” Kratom is not ordinarily consumed as food in the UK, and a psychoactive ingredient is exactly what the exemption excludes. Selling kratom as a botanical or as “incense” does not move it into the food category.
The legislators had kratom specifically in mind. When the Bill was going through Parliament, the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, the statutory body that advises the Home Secretary, wrote to say that some natural psychoactive substances are harmful and named “Ibogaine and Kratom” as examples. The Council warned that limiting the Bill to synthetic products would leave a loophole. The exemption for herbal products that followed was confined to those regulated as medicines, which kratom is not.
What is an offence, and what is not
The Home Office guidance sets out what the Act prohibits. It is an offence to produce a psychoactive substance, to supply it or offer to supply it, to possess it with intent to supply, to import or export it, and to possess it in a custodial institution such as a prison.
Simple possession is not on that list. Possessing kratom for your own use, outside a prison, is not a criminal offence in the United Kingdom. This is a deliberate feature of the Act, not an oversight: the law was aimed at the sellers, not the people who use the substances.
There is a catch that undoes most of the apparent freedom. Importing is an offence, and it is an offence even when you are importing for your own consumption. Ordering kratom from a Dutch, German or American website and having it posted to a UK address is importing. The package crosses into the jurisdiction, and the act of bringing it in is the offence, regardless of the fact that possessing it once it arrives would not be.
So the practical position is this. You may lawfully hold kratom. You may not lawfully buy it from a UK seller, because the seller commits an offence by supplying it. You may not lawfully order it from abroad, because that is importing. Even a gift is a supply. Every route by which a person could actually come to have kratom runs through an offence committed by someone.
“Not on the European list” does not mean legal to sell
The EU Drugs Agency’s kratom profile lists the countries that control kratom by name, and the United Kingdom is not among them. That absence is easy to misread.
The UK is not on that list because it does not control kratom by naming it. It controls kratom through the blanket definition of the Psychoactive Substances Act, which no list of named substances will ever capture. A shop that points to the European list as evidence that kratom is legal to sell in Britain is either mistaken or hoping you are.
A second bar: an unauthorised novel food
Even if the Psychoactive Substances Act did not exist, kratom could still not lawfully be sold as a food in Great Britain. A separate regime reaches the same result by another route.
Under the Food Standards Agency’s novel food rules, any food not consumed to a significant degree in the UK or the EU before 15 May 1997 is a “novel food,” and may not be placed on the market in Great Britain until it has been authorised. Those rules are the assimilated version of Regulation (EU) 2015/2283, the novel food regulation the UK kept after leaving the EU.
Kratom has no history of significant food use in Britain before that date, and the rules put the burden of proving otherwise on the seller rather than on the regulator. No authorisation for kratom appears on the FSA’s Register of Novel Foods Authorisations. The register is served ten rows at a time in a browser, which is no way to prove an absence, so we took the whole thing as a single file instead: 173 authorisations across 2,655 rows, last updated 31 March 2026, with no occurrence of kratom, Mitragyna or mitragynine anywhere in it. Astaxanthin, chia seeds, noni juice, krill oil and lycopene are all in the same file, which is what tells us the register rendered rather than came back empty.
So kratom is an unauthorised novel food, and selling it for human consumption is unlawful on that ground alone, before the Psychoactive Substances Act is reached at all. Northern Ireland follows the EU novel food rules rather than the Great Britain ones, and the position there is the same: kratom is absent from the Union list of authorised novel foods, which we read in the consolidated text in force from 10 August 2026.
This second bar is why kratom across Europe is so often sold with “not for human consumption” labelling, or as incense, or as a botanical specimen. The labelling is a legal manoeuvre, not a description of what the product is for.